Sexual violence against woman at quarantine center during coronavirus disease 2019 in Bangladesh: Risk factors and recommendations

Abstract

Creative Commons Non Commercial CC BY-NC: This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 License (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the SAGE and Open Access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). Sexual violence can be defined as a range of activities from verbal sexual harassment to sexual force for involuntary penetration. According to the World Health Organization (WHO), sexual violence is “any sexual act, attempt to obtain a sexual act, or other act directed against a person’s sexuality using coercion, by any person regardless of their relationship to the victim, in any setting”. Rape is a severe form of sexual violence. WHO defined rape as “physical violence against the body with coerced penetration of the vulva, anus, or oral cavity”. Worldwide, one in every three women suffers from sexual violence by their close partners or non-partners.1 However, this behavior abruptly increased by 20% during the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic across the world.2 A study reported interpersonal violence against women during COVID-19 quarantine.3 In Bangladesh, we also noticed a case of sexual violence against a woman at an institutional quarantine center.4 Therefore, we aimed to discuss the associated risk factors of such sexual behaviors and actionable items that might prevent this sort of crime in Bangladesh. Government-imposed quarantines in Bangladesh are necessary to curb the spread of the coronavirus from the present COVID-19 hotspots, India.5,6 However, the people of Bangladesh detested enforced institutional quarantine from the very beginning of the pandemic due to limited facilities, poor living conditions, and security concerns.7 The potential reason behind this increased sexual violence is the low rate of help-seeking behavior of victimized women. In Bangladesh, about 90% of perpetrators of rape cases reported that they did not have any legal consequences for raping.8 Also, lockdowns and movement restrictions have created high exposure of women to the abusive male perpetrator during the COVID-19 pandemic. Sexual violence and rapes against women have increased during the COVID-19 pandemic in Bangladesh.9 Based on the statistics from “Odhikar”, an organization of human rights defenders in Bangladesh, incidences of rape had increased by 42% in 2020 compared to the prior year, and a total of 317 women and children have become victims of rape in January to March of 2021 alone.10,11 Also, mental health disorders, domestic violence, and suicide incidences have increased during COVID-19 in Bangladesh.12–14 Sexual violence against women at quarantine center might exacerbate the growing concerns and fears of general people about institutional quarantines. On the contrary, sexual harassment and dowry-related violence against women have decreased in Bangladesh.6 Improvements of these two indicators might be due to results from different government and non-government initiatives, for example, improvement in female education rates, social awareness against dowry, and child marriage. Implementation of dowry and sexual harassment-related laws might have been helped to improve the situation. However, the increasing trend of sexual violence against women is not limited to Bangladesh. United Nations has Sexual violence against woman at quarantine center during coronavirus disease 2019 in Bangladesh: Risk factors and recommendations